Intellectual Tango
by JX Valentine
Summary: "Their relationship, like every other in the history of romance, was far from simple." One-sentence stories about a boy, a girl, and all the ways one can avoid saying three simple words.  Prodigyshipping.
1. Alpha

**Author's Note:** These were originally done for the 1sentence community on LiveJournal. It's been a bit over a year since I finished it, so I decided to go back, revise, and post the whole thing here. (There's five parts in all, one for each prompt set.) Most sentences are new, in case you've read it there or on dA. Some sentences are related to one another to tell a story. (I think there's three or four story threads throughout the whole work, in fact.) And some aren't really sentences but more like abuse to sentence constructs or complete technicalities. (Dialogue = part of a sentence here.)

If you got past all that, awesome! Enjoy, and if you liked it, leave a review. If you didn't, leave one anyway?

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><p><strong>#01 – Comfort<strong>  
>She pretended that she wasn't afraid of anything, that she had no weaknesses to speak of, but the first time they had a civil conversation was when they were stuck in a broken elevator, when she cried and held onto him and made him swear he wouldn't tell anyone she was afraid of the dark.<p>

**#02 – Kiss**  
>Lanette consented – for curiosity, naturally – to giving him his first kiss, but although it was short and not the softest or most passionate she had ever received, when she pulled away she couldn't help but notice the rosy color on her partner's cheeks.<p>

**#03 – Soft**  
>Bill couldn't help but laugh when he saw what took up an entire bookshelf in her room; Lanette frowned, threw one of her plush dolls at him, and said, "Oh, it's not like your collection of comic books is any better."<p>

**#04 – Pain**  
>The first time he was injured on the job – first-year internship, Safari Zone, when he thought it would be a brilliant idea to get a close look at the tauros herds – she stood in his hospital room, lecturing him into the ground while silently deciding that from that day forward, she wanted nothing more than to take care of him and protect him from himself.<p>

**#05 – Potatoes**  
>One of the many things Bill never fully mastered was cooking, but rather than feel ashamed of it, he took pleasure in standing close to Lanette and having her teach him, for the umpteenth time, how to make potato pancakes.<p>

**#06 – Rain**  
>"I don't know why you like living next to the ocean. It rains too much," Lanette said haggardly into her knees; she was too busy looking out the window at the dark night to notice what he was doing until he wrapped his arms around her, told her it wasn't so bad, and somehow made her feelings of dread vanish.<p>

**#07 – Chocolate**  
>A fan once gave him supposedly dark chocolate, and because Lanette knew him well, she was the only one he didn't throw out of his hotel suite when he locked himself in the bathroom and proceeded to spend a good two hours immensely miserable.<p>

**#08 – Happiness**  
>For Bill, happiness is freedom, a friendship with a rare pokémon, and the ability to work closely with someone who can keep up with him every step of the way, and as far as he's concerned, he has two out of three.<p>

**#09 – Telephone**  
>"Oh, hold on, Lanette, lemme get him. Nii-chan! It's the girl you fancy!" his sister announced, and by the time the sounds of loud banging, the eight-year-old's shrieking laughter, and his colorful use of his mother's native language subsided, Lanette was too busy laughing hysterically to come up with a witty way to greet her partner.<p>

**#10 – Ears**  
>He didn't notice she had pierced ears until the night of the Symposium's formal gala, when she put her orange hair up in a tight bun and added a pair of diamond drop earrings; Bill found he couldn't help but touch one of them and comment about how the style made her look like a princess, which led to his hand trailing down the smooth skin of her neck and bare shoulder… which then led to them forgetting about the gala altogether.<p>

**#11 – Name**  
>The only person outside of her family who knew that Lanette was actually her middle name was Bill; she trusted him with her three-syllable secret, which to this day he keeps faithfully like a priest guarding the Holy Grail.<p>

**#12 – Sensual**  
>At the end of their intellectual dance – the discussion of psychology and physiology and philosophy, their theories intertwining at some places and clashing at others – she's up against his desk with her tongue tasting his mouth and his hands exploring the soft curves of her body, and right then, they decide to drop their pretentious inquiries for an experiment of a more visceral sort.<p>

**#13 – Death**  
>"If I didn't know any better, I'd say you were worried that I was d—" he says, and despite his injuries, she clips his thought with a slap and a lecture about how stupid he is sometimes.<p>

**#14 – Sex**  
>It was another great experiment of his: his head between her legs, taking in her scent, her taste, the vibrations of her pleasure; he considered it a success.<p>

**#15 – Touch**  
>For all her experience, Lanette was shy to tell him about all the ways she sensed him: hearing the softness of his voice repeating her name, seeing the coffee-brown of his eyes, tasting the sugar-sweetness of his lips, smelling his bittersweet aroma as she nestled her head against the sweep of his neck, and – her favorite – feeling the roughness of his calloused fingertips trailing along her bare skin.<p>

**#16 – Weakness**  
>For the life of him, Bill can't spell; no one knows this except Lanette, who agrees to proofread his papers and smiles a little too sweetly when he begs her once again to keep it a secret.<p>

**#17 – Tears**  
>Because he sees her as a partner and not a lover, it doesn't hurt Bill to know that Lanette dates other men; it hurts him when those other men break up with her, when she tries her best in the following weeks not to cry, when he silently decides that he wants nothing more than to take care of her and protect her from everyone else.<p>

**#18 – Speed**  
>They played a sort of verbal tennis with each other, throwing witticism and questions and answers back and forth with precision and quickness until, inevitably, one of them would stumble over his words while the other walked away with a smirk on her face.<p>

**#19 – Wind**  
>The typhoon bore down on the coast of Cerulean Cape until it knocked out the power, and in that moment, Lanette curled up in the arms of her partner – the one who had lived through an entire lifetime of storms – and listened to him tell her all the stories he could remember about the sea.<p>

**#20 – Freedom**  
>There was a time, right after Bill announced he would be buying and moving into a lighthouse in the desolate northwest corner of Kanto, that Lanette thought he was genuinely crazy, but when she visited him for the first time and noticed the peace and solitude – the lack of anyone to tell him what to do with himself or to judge him for the way he lived his life – she turned from skeptical to impressed.<p>

**#21 – Life**  
>Little by little, the egg cracked and chipped, tiny pieces of shell flying everywhere as a tiny wet eevee nose poked into the world, and at the sight of it, Bill inhaled and grasped Lanette's hand until it hurt while Lanette smiled quietly at her partner.<p>

**#22 – Jealousy**  
>They consider their relationship (whatever it might actually be) to be very open, but this doesn't stop Bill from greeting Lanette's new boyfriend (a wealthy trainer with a thing for zigzagoon, it seems) with a tense and slightly sarcastic, "Pleasure to meet you."<p>

**#23 – Hands**  
>At first, Bill, afraid that Lanette might abandon him for his stupidity, tried to hide his hands from her, but when he accidentally let her see them (and how <em>wrong <em>they looked with only three fingers covered in white feathers), she looked at him with wide eyes, grasped his wrists tighter, and asked, "What's happening to you?"

**#24 – Taste**  
>If asked a certain question, Bill will reply that she tastes like fresh water; if asked to elaborate, Bill will always run off on a barely related tangent.<p>

**#25 – Devotion**  
>The main problem Bill had was that, although he was convinced he had to devote his entire being to only one thing at a time, he was currently split between his research and his partner; Lanette saw this and knew that no matter what she told him, he would be too terrified of becoming his father to try having both.<p>

**#26 – Forever**  
>Thanks to his past mistakes, Bill's body now slips from one shape to another, sometimes without his consent, but each time it happens, Lanette reassures him that she won't care what form he takes so long as he remembers he has been, is, and will always be <em>Bill<em>, the one person who deserves to be called her partner.

**#27 – Blood**  
>"Why won't you be more careful?" Lanette sighed as she examined the red cut going across his arm; just as he was about to respond with something indignant, she, knowing he would and preferring to have the last word in the matter, dabbed a cotton ball soaked with alcohol directly into the wound and listened to him yelp a little too dramatically.<p>

**#28 – Sickness**  
>Sitting on the edge of the bed, Lanette put a hand on one of Bill's and realized that his fingers were ice-cold, but there was nothing she could do except warm them against her skin and wait for the antidote to repair the damage a wild seviper did to him.<p>

**#29 – Melody**  
>"What are you working on now?" she asked, and when he explained it to her and played back the pokémon's deep, melodic cry, she told him it sounded lonely and was pleasantly startled afterwards when his eyes widened in what she came to call his "eureka expression."<p>

**#30 – Star**  
>Whether it was because of Jirachi or their space program or something else, Hoennians seemed to have a natural affinity for the stars; that, besides the commentary his partner could provide, was the reason why Bill took pleasure in lying on the beach with Lanette and asking her what she saw.<p>

**#31 – Home**  
>The Sea Cottage was not where Lanette lived while the Meteor Falls Outpost was not where Bill spent most of his days, but nonetheless, they still felt perfectly at home in each other's laboratories, working side-by-side on the same projects.<p>

**#32 – Confusion**  
>Bebe, ever a gossip, once asked them what the word "partner" actually meant, and at that, they stopped, exchanged glances, and said in perfect unison, "It's complicated."<p>

**#33 – Fear**  
>She barely remembers the day he found out she can't swim; the clearest image she has is of Bill (who was just as soaked as she was) carrying her back to the Sea Cottage, joking that he was supposed to be the clumsy one, and shaking uncontrollably from something that couldn't have just been the cold.<p>

**#34 - Lightning/Thunder**  
>At one point, Bill ends up on the floor but can't remember how; all he knows is that Lanette, whose face is ghostly pale, is checking his pulse and saying to him in a suspiciously strained voice, "Your jolteon's Thunder is too strong to serve as a backup generator, and <em>don't you dare argue with me about that again.<em>"

**#35 – Bonds**  
>They weren't married – and probably never would be because neither of them liked the concept too much – but when people saw him slow down for her, saw her walk a little too closely to him, saw them communicate with their language of looks and gestures and banter more often than the rapid jargon they would use with anyone else in their respective fields, it was very easy to call them "partners" and mean something a little stronger.<p>

**#36 – Market**  
>Bill didn't actually like shopping in Goldenrod City's Underground Path because it was risking a massive dose of sensory overload for him, but he put up with it that day because he thought it was cute to watch Lanette flit from shop to shop on the hunt for the best bargains.<p>

**#37 – Technology**  
>In another lifetime, he is an inventor under the employ of the Pokémon Cutting-Edge Technology Research Center, she is a shy lab assistant, and their first meeting involves cups of coffee in the research center's café, her timid voice sharing all kinds of ideas with him while he smiles and becomes the first person to take her seriously.<p>

**#38 – Gift**  
>Bill knew since he was very young that he had the ability to do great things in this world but that most people would only see him as different and strange; as a result, he spent much of his life assuming that no human would be able to grasp the things that went on in his head… until fate gave him Lanette.<p>

**#39 – Smile**  
>Over the years, Bill had seen a countless variety of smiles dance across Lanette's face: the knowing one when she was certain of something, the ironic one when someone did something stupid, the forced one when she was refusing to cry, and – his favorite – the indescribable one she would give only to him.<p>

**#40 – Innocence**  
>Lanette was always amused by the fact that Bill, who grew up in a bustling city surrounded by all grades of people, managed to walk out of it completely sheltered, so when Bebe left him completely confused by something she told him he should do, Lanette couldn't help smile in feigned sweetness and explain to him exactly what "eating out" actually meant.<p>

**#41 – Completion**  
>Although she didn't like clichés, she thought that their relationship could best be described as yin and yang: his eccentric personality, his interest in ancient pokémon psychology, his mastery of hardware matched her earthly disposition, her interest in ancient pokémon physiology, her mastery of software to the point where it couldn't have been a coincidence that they met.<p>

**#42 – Clouds**  
>"How can you stand living next to a volcano? Don't you ever get bored seeing nothing but gray everywhere?" Bill asked, and she, giving him her indescribable smile, blew a cloud of ash his way.<p>

**#43 – Sky**  
>At the top of the lighthouse tower, when the sky is painted pink and blue and purple, Lanette reaches out to touch the setting sun, and she knows instantly why he thinks that place is so magical.<p>

**#44 – Heaven**  
>"As a scientist, do you believe Heaven exists?" she asked one day, and he responded by smiling at her and saying absolutely nothing.<p>

**#45 – Hell**  
>They were taken to separate rooms and beaten and tortured until almost every inch of their bodies were tinged with the same color as the letter R on their captors' shirts; what made them stay silent wasn't the need to protect the storage system but instead the thought that no matter what happened and no matter how long those walls stood between them, it wasn't truly Hell so long as each one knew that the other was alive.<p>

**#46 – Sun**  
>Hoennians did not worship the sun but rather feared it, and when the sun over Fallarbor turned unnaturally bright for days, the first person she turned to was him.<p>

**#47 – Moon**  
>Hoenn did not worship the moon at all while Johto did, so when he told her the story of the Guardian of the Moon, fast asleep in a death-like slumber beneath the Whirl Islands, she clung to his every word.<p>

**#48 – Waves**  
>Despite having her own life preserver, Lanette keeps one of her arms tightly hooked around Bill's waist as the waves carry them and her whiscash further out to sea; Bill pretends to preoccupy himself with keeping them steady on the fish's back in order to avoid betraying how much he's enjoying himself (for reasons other than the opportunity to witness a lapras migration).<p>

**#49 – Hair**  
>"I've never seen you with your hair down. I like it," he said casually one day, and he wasn't entirely surprised to see her with it down again the next.<p>

**#50 – Supernova**  
>The most wonderful thing, she decided, about being with Bill was catching the moments when he suddenly became inspired: at those points, he went from soft-spoken and serene to an excited whirlwind of motion and vocalized stream of consciousness – a difference that reminded her of a silent, brilliant star abruptly exploding in a dramatic rush of fire and light.<p> 


	2. Beta

**Author's Note:** #37 contains an excerpt from "The Saddest Poem" by Pablo Neruda.

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><p><strong>#01 – Walking<strong>  
>They don't hold hands because that would complicate things.<p>

**#02 – Waltz**  
>Bill, the more poetic of the two, would sometimes describe their work as a waltz, one mind dancing in tune with another to produce something beautiful; Lanette, the more down-to-earth of the two, would jokingly ask which one of them was leading.<p>

**#03 – Wishes**  
>Johtonians did not have legends about creatures that granted wishes (or, in hindsight, any legend that didn't end with pokémon dragging humans to unpleasant fates), so when she explained to him why she was folding down the flaps of a pinwheel, he clung to her every word.<p>

**#04 – Wonder**  
>Sometimes, Lanette would find herself watching Bill instead of working alongside him; as his hands carefully explored each fossil, she compared the way he worked – a mixture of childlike awe and scientific thoroughness – to an artist in motion.<p>

**#05 – Worry**  
>Bill swears to Bebe that he doesn't care what kind of company Lanette keeps, but when five hours pass since his partner left for a date with that arrogant ace trainer, what Bill told Bebe doesn't stop him from checking his pokégear every time he thinks she isn't looking.<p>

**#06 – Whimsy**  
>Contrary to popular belief regarding his sanity, Bill has a perfectly logical reason behind everything he does, but Lanette, who over the years learned how to decipher her partner's actions, still needs to ask why he has a ho-oh costume that "doesn't even <em>look<em> like a ho-oh, and anyway, aren't you studying tirtouga now?"

**#07 - Waste/Wasteland**  
>After Groudon was summoned and most of the planet died in a blaze of never-ending sunlight, they wandered the country after the end of the world, helping other survivors here and there but mostly just looking for the Garden of Eden – <em>their<em> Garden of Eden.

**#08 - Whiskey and rum**  
>Bill, completely drunk on whiskey and rum and other terrible decisions he can't quite remember, asks Bebe one question concerning Lanette that, unbeknownst to him, tears his best friend apart inside.<p>

**#09 – War**  
>Team Rocket wanted a war, and they gave them one – by feigning surrender and subsequently disappearing in the confusion while their virus crippled the organization from the inside out.<p>

**#10 – Weddings**  
>If anyone asked Lanette if she and Bill ever considered getting married, she would respond with an icy "no"; if anyone asked Bill the same question, he would calmly reply, "Lanette hates wedding gowns, and I sincerely doubt anyone would want to see me in one, either."<p>

**#11 – Birthday**  
>Lanette's birthday, unlike her partner's, does not fall on any day of importance in their culture and is therefore easy to forget if she doesn't mention it, but every year without fail, there is an eevee holding a new doll in her storage system account… even if she nearly forgot what day it was herself.<p>

**#12 – Blessing**  
>"You know, Bill, Lanette's been a lot happier since the two of you began… whatever you call your relationship," Brigette says, and Bill knows that underneath that are implied meanings like "you have my consent to be pursuing this relationship with my sister" and "please take care of her or I'll kill you."<p>

**#13 – Bias**  
>"If, hypothetically speaking, Jirachi appeared to you and said that it could either give you the opportunity to make the discovery that revolutionizes pokéology as we know it <em>or<em>allow you to meet the one person who will love you unconditionally but that you can't have both, which would you choose?" Bill asked one day, and to that, Lanette glanced at him with a bored expression, told him that was a rather silly question, but pointedly failed to give him an answer at all.

**#14 – Burning**  
>Although Bill would always jokingly call her the fiery one in their relationship (because Lanette never could hide her temper), Lanette saw in him an intensity of emotions and passions that could – as cliché as it was – be best described as a brilliant fire; some nights she worried that it might burn up everything inside him and leave him empty and soulless.<p>

**#15 – Breathing**  
>Her favorite sound was the one of his breathing as he slept; the nights she spent with him, she lay her head on his chest and let it remind her that they were both absolutely human.<p>

**#16 – Breaking**  
>When Lanette walked out on him the next morning, he broke apart their prototype, took out the parts she had worked on, and reassembled it by himself using his own designs; Bill didn't particularly care that the act was childish… or that he knew the device would never run as perfectly as it did a day ago.<p>

**#17 – Belief**  
>Between the logical, science-backed theories floating through his head, Bill believed in aliens, in yeti, in ghosts, in fairies, in Ho-oh and Mew, in a million things Lanette thought were impossible, yet the way he talked about them – with just about as much enthusiasm as he put in everything else – she almost wanted to believe in them too.<p>

**#18 – Balloon**  
>By the time Lanette found Bill, the jigglypuff he had previously been watching was just finishing up the masterpiece it was leaving in permanent marker across his face; as it bounced away (too angry to notice Lanette), she thought briefly about waking him up but found the scene too amusing to disturb.<p>

**#19 – Balcony**  
>Regardless of how much time she spent there, Lanette knew she would never feel at home in the Sea Cottage, what with its isolation and the old, creaky atmosphere throughout the house, but on the other hand, she couldn't imagine a more beautiful view than the sight of the moon and sparkling, black ocean from the lighthouse tower.<p>

**#20 – Bane**  
>"Oh, <em>honestly<em>, Bill," Lanette said, "we're only attending the gala for an hour, and you don't look _that_ bad in a kilt."

**#21 – Quiet**  
>There were times when Brigette, Bebe, or Celio would walk into the lab to find Bill and Lanette communicating in a language of gestures and facial expressions, and not a single one of them could figure out how one understood the other perfectly.<p>

**#22 – Quirks**  
>Bill maintained a happily flippant attitude towards all the rumors about his sexual habits, his psychological stability, and a thousand other things about what he did in his spare time; after all, what did any of it matter if Lanette had no trouble accepting him as her partner, despite all of his <em>real<em> oddities?

**#23 – Question**  
>Many of Bill's odd questions ("I'm bored; will you help me invent a time machine," "it's three in the morning; would you like to go with me to a fantastic coffee place," "I want to try a psychological experiment; do you know where I put the drill") Lanette could answer with a simple "yes" or "no," but there was one question he asked after he kissed her one day that she couldn't answer right away.<p>

**#24 – Quarrel**  
>There was a day when Bill, in one of his more egotistical moments, went as far as implying that he could do a better job at Lanette's half of the project than she could, but from the moment she declared she needed a break and slammed the door behind her, Bill waited for her to come back so he could apologize.<p>

**#25 – Quitting**  
>There wasn't a moment when they could quit being scientists: over coffee, walking through town, exploring each other in bed – they were always analyzing, always experimenting, always toying with their reality.<p>

**#26 – Jump**  
>"Imagine a jump through time and space: a machine that can propel matter instantaneously wherever you want to send it. From here to Hoenn, from here to Mars… just one little jump through our machine! Just <em>think<em> about what this will do to the world as we know it, Lanette! And all we have to do is figure out how to make it work for a poké ball," he said, and as his gestures became wilder and wilder with each new sentence, she smirked and realized she just couldn't say no to him, no matter how crazy his ideas might be.

**#27 – Jester**  
>He juggled tamato berries for his youngest sister and smiled warmly whenever he caught a glimpse of her lean forward to watch; noticing this, Lanette realized there was a number of things she never knew about Bill – like, for example, how much he actually cared for his siblings.<p>

**#28 – Jousting**  
>Their game of questions ended, once again, with Bill stumbling over his words and failing to respond to Lanette's latest riposte; to that, she smirked at him and said, "You're letting me win, aren't you?"<p>

**#29 – Jewel**  
>In the other lifetime, he took her to Mt. Moon to meet his friends; that night, as she sat beside him at the fire, she held the moon stone to the light and examined it with her wide, garnet-red eyes, all while failing to notice how he smiled at her through his explanations.<p>

**#30 – Just**  
>"It <em>has<em> crossed your mind that you can pick the lock with _just _a bobby pin, hasn't it?" she asked as she watched him assemble a small device (out of a tin of sardines, a safety pin, batteries, and chewed bubblegum) to blow out the lock on the door, and to that, he replied that he thought the easy way would be boring.

**#31 – Smirk**  
>Although she can never accurately predict what Bill would do in self-defense, she knows when he's playing mind games with his opponent when he begins to smirk; at those times – like just before he hacked into the controls of the Rocket mecha and threatened to have it eject the grunts inside (a blatant lie) if they didn't surrender – when he smirks, she's simultaneously relieved that he knows what to do and terrified of how dangerous he is if someone pisses him off enough.<p>

**#32 – Sorrow**  
>Although Bill is by no means an optimist, Lanette can tell by the way he looks at the thousands of problems he sees in this world that he would rather kill himself trying to fix them than break down and accept the things that are just beyond his power, and just watching him silently struggle for an answer to everything nearly breaks her heart.<p>

**#33 – Stupidity**  
>Unfortunately, there was no such thing as a stupid idea to Bill; that's why Lanette frequently sighed and stood by, ready to patch him up, dust him off, and sweep up the broken bits of glass and metal when yet another instance of Bill's apparent lack of reasonable judgment tried her patience.<p>

**#34 – Serenade**  
>Bill adores music of all kinds, but he realizes that there's just something special about the way Lanette plays the violin.<p>

**#35 – Sarcasm**  
>As Lanette pulled one pin after another from her partner's back (put there by a hive of beedrill who were rather unappreciative of Bill's overzealousness in following a pokémon through their territory), Bill thanked her for her patience and kindness, to which she responded, "Oh, think nothing of it, Bill. You know I <em>adore <em>how colorful and exciting you make my life by doing things before you even bother to think them through."

**#36 – Sordid**  
>Brigette swore she would never touch a thing in Bill's laboratory again after she walked in on her sister and her colleague finding creative uses for half his toolbox and the spare roll of electrical tape.<p>

**#37 – Soliloquy**  
>"…Someone else's. She will be someone else's. As she once belonged to my kisses. Her voice, her light body. Her infinite eyes. I no longer love her, true, but perhaps I love her. Love is so short and oblivion so long. Because on nights like this I held her in my arms, my soul is lost without her. Although this may be the last pain she causes me, and this," Bill read, just before snapping the book closed (and shoving it right back where it belonged on Lanette's shelves), "is not the least bit helpful."<p>

**#38 – Sojourn**  
>"I know a place you need to see. Come on," she said, and she led him to a place deep within the caves of Meteor Falls, where the solrock and lunatone danced in slow, sweeping paths near the cavern's sparkling, golden ceiling and where, for once, she saw him take a rest from analyzing everything and just stand there in speechless awe.<p>

**#39 – Share**  
>Their first time studying together had been rather awkward from her perspective in that Lanette wasn't sure whether or not to see him as a friend… until he pulled a box from his backpack, pushed it across the table, and said, "Here. You look hungry, and I heard onigiri were your favorite."<p>

**#40 – Solitary**  
>A lot of people mistakenly assumed that just because Bill lived in a lighthouse far from civilization that it meant he lived completely alone, while in truth, he had plenty of companions to think about: his pokémon, his sisters, his colleagues, and most importantly his partner, and it's the thought of the last one that keeps Bill warm on the black nights by the sea.<p>

**#41 – Nowhere**  
>One day, Bill simply disappeared without a trace; months later, after the police scoured everything and found nothing to point to where he might have gone, Lanette stepped into his lab to look for her own clues, stopped when she felt a hand brush hers, and whispered into the seemingly empty room, "…You're still here, aren't you?"<p>

**#42 – Neutral**  
>Quite often, Bebe (a fiery, impulsive creature) and Lanette (calm and hard as ice) clashed in opinions, and equally as often, Bill (their middle ground – Bebe's best friend and Lanette's partner) had to lock himself in his laboratory and pretend he was working in order to avoid being dragged into another catfight.<p>

**#43 – Nuance**  
>Lanette had a habit of maintaining a cold, rigid politeness about her at all times, but Bill, who knew her just as well as she knew him, could hear the tenseness in her voice, could see the quiver of the corners of her mouth, could know from a thousand tiny details what she was really feeling at any given moment.<p>

**#44 – Near**  
>It wasn't unusual for Bill to be far from her – in Kanto while she was in Hoenn, traveling to one part of the globe while she traveled to the other, a million other possibilities – but the distance seemed to close every time she spotted his e-mail address in her inbox.<p>

**#45 – Natural**  
>One day, after a period of not seeing him for several months, Lanette found out Bill dyed his hair, and as a result, she spent half an hour in bed that night running her fingers through his curls, staring at the way the vivid, grassy color darkened gradually into a deep forest green just before it abruptly turned into a mousy brown at the roots – until, of course, he realized she wasn't just petting him out of affection and self-consciously buried his head under his pillow.<p>

**#46 – Horizon**  
>In a rush of gray and blue, the sun rose above the horizon; huddled close to each other (because he thought she was trembling because of the cold), the two of them watched it and the sea pokémon breaking the surface of the dark waves to greet the new day.<p>

**#47 – Valiant**  
>Lanette kept her chin up as she threw open the doors and strode forward to stand next to the boy (the one who held her and calmed her through her hysterics in the broken elevator… the one whose neck she was saving for some strange reason) in front of the judicial board, and before a single one of them could say a word, she took a deep breath, held up the recorder, and said, "He didn't do it. He didn't cheat on any of those exams. It was his classmates, and I have the tape to prove it."<p>

**#48 – Virtuous**  
>Bill was her knight – ever faithful, honest, and sweet to her; Lanette was his princess… except less the kind that needed to be saved and more the kind who would lead armies into battle to protect her sheltered Don Quixote.<p>

**#49 – Victory**  
>Lanette had patiently waited for most of her life to say three simple words to Bill, so when he ignored her advice and wound up taking a full face of an oddish's Stun Spore, the first words she had to tell him (after she had rushed to his side and shoved cheri berries into his mouth) were, "Told you so."<p>

**#50 – Defeat**  
>Bill was normally so careful, the kind of person who not only plotted his own moves out several turns in advance but also analyzed every action his opponent took to pick out patterns, see into their minds, and use it against them at every opportunity, but when Lanette, in her first game against him, placed her knight near his king and declared checkmate, he didn't feel at all angry at himself as he smiled and admitted defeat.<p> 


	3. Gamma

**Author's Note:** This set, AKA the one least changed in the massive revamp. There's still a few things I feel like I could've done better, the least of which would be the fact that it's the set closest to outright saying that Bill is something supernatural (which may or may not disrupt the whole "these two are human" thing I've been trying to get going). But I'll shut up about author's bias and whatnot because the whole point is what you guys think of it anyway, right?

In any case, the computer mentioned in #45 was real, and the code mentioned in #5 is a usable Unix code (assuming you're not doing silly things with it like Bill is). Just a couple bits of trivia there.**  
><strong>

* * *

><p><strong>#01 - Ring<strong>  
>When she wants him to stop and rethink what he's doing, she reaches out for him, and her hand makes a perfect ring around his wrist while her eyes send him a stern and steady glare.<p>

**#02 – Hero**  
>Because Bill never got used to the notion of having his own fan following, he would address each self-proclaimed pokémaniac with an embarrassed rush of words about his colleagues, and because of that, when a young girl from New Bark approached him in Ecruteak's pokémon center, he wasn't entirely conscious of the fact that the first and only name that managed to slip out of his mouth was Lanette's.<p>

**#03 - Memory**  
>All the memories that kept him who he was – that kept his soul intact and his mind human no matter what kinds of ordeals the universe wanted to throw at him next – were of her, her soft hands on the sides of his face and her sunset-red eyes staring deep into his face as she told him exactly what he was and will always be.<p>

**#04 - Box**  
>When they weren't anywhere near one another, they would play a game where they hacked into each other's accounts and leave pokémon that they thought represented their partner for them to find and interpret; Lanette once left a togepi (pokémon of innocence, of youth, of naïveté) in one of Bill's boxes, while he responded by depositing a blue shuckle into one of hers.<p>

**#05 - Run**  
>Bill paused for awhile and stared at a half-written command, trying to think of what to write after that and realizing a little too irritably that while he was a genius with hardware, his skills with software were nothing compared to Lanette's, especially now that his mind was thoroughly preoccupied with trying to figure out just why his thoughts were getting so easily derailed nowadays, and at that thought, he deleted what he was writing and wrote a new command that predictably gave him nothing but an error: <em>chmod u+x a simpler relationship.<em>

**#06 - Hurricane**  
>"<em>You're crazy!<em>" Lanette screamed into the typhoon winds, and as she clung to the door and watched her partner smile at her and mount the steps to the tower, tools in hand to fix the flickering beacon, her heart beat frantically in her chest over more than just fear for his life.

**#07 - Wings**  
>Lanette examined the rainbow-colored feather Bill had just given her while he told her about what Johtonians said about it (that it was a Rainbow Wing, that it represented the feather from the god of the sun, that most people thought of it as a good-luck charm), but he artfully neglected to tell her about the other tradition in Johtonian regional culture – the one about what it means when a person gives it to someone close to them.<p>

**#08 - Cold**  
>"If there is anything I miss about Hoenn right now, it would be the fact that its winters are usually warm, but I'm fine and not bothered by the cold at all, and <em>don't you dare touch me with that coat of yours, Bill McKenzie, because I can handle it just as well as you!<em>"

**#09 - Red**  
>By now, she associates the color red with him: red for his heart (how he always thinks with it, no matter how hard he tries to be a logical, cold intellectual like his heroes), red for blood (how often she's seen his), red for nobility (how he seems to go back and forth between styling himself as an aristocrat and hating everything upper-class by principle), and red for her eyes (how she sometimes sees him staring strangely into them).<p>

**#10 - Drink**  
>"Honestly, Bill," Lanette sighed as she handed him a prairie oyster, "I can't understand why you would drink tequila with Bebe despite knowing that you're a lightweight, and don't you dare tell me it was because you were curious because I am thinking straight right now and can make that hangover of yours a <em>living hell<em>."

**#11 - Midnight**  
>Lanette knew that Bill was normally nocturnal; however, she was amused to find him sleeping at his desk well before midnight – amused enough to bring down a blanket, cover as much as she could of him, and leave him like that for daybreak to find.<p>

**#12 - Temptation**  
>"One of the reasons why I feel comfortable with you, Bill, is because you understand that a relationship doesn't have to be based on sex," she said once while ironically wearing a blouse cut scandalously low (and squeezing her arms in front of herself just enough to emphasize this), and to her complete amusement, Bill took the bait and answered her with a cracked voice.<p>

**#13 – View**  
>When she was a child, Lanette believed the universe ran on science, math, things that could be quantified, but then Bill waltzed into her world and challenged the way she saw it on every last count imaginable.<p>

**#14 - Music**  
>Making music was one of those talents Bill simply had but never realized he did; he would play the piano on his breaks or decipher, remix, and record pokémon cries on the job, completely unaware that his soft melodies always drove Lanette to drop everything – regardless of what she was doing – and simply listen.<p>

**#15 - Silk**  
>When Bill came back covered head-to-toe with the aftereffects of String Shot, he thought he would never hear the end of it from his partner; much to his surprise (and relief), all she had to say as she plucked threads from his curly hair was, "It suits you."<p>

**#16 - Cover**  
>Although it was sometimes a necessary evil, neither of them liked field research: while Bill had an aversion to the outdoors, Lanette had more of an aversion to seeing what territorial pokémon would do once Bill's luck inevitably blew his own cover.<p>

**#17 - Promise**  
>All Brigette knows is that her sister and the researcher in Kanto have a relationship built on a promise: she doesn't know the details, though she can tell it's strong, it's deep, and it's something that her sister won't break, even though Brigette can see it's killing Lanette inside.<p>

**#18 - Dream**  
>Sometimes, Bill told her about the dreams he had at night, about the voices and the songs of silhouetted pokémon calling out to him, telling him something important he could never remember upon waking up; Lanette, hearing this, smiled grimly and knew all too well that not only did Bill have a higher purpose for his existence but also that this purpose didn't include her.<p>

**#19 - Candle**  
>Candle – candela – the unit of measuring light intensity: Lanette occasionally associates the word with Bill, not because of one cliché (that he's intellectually brilliant) or another (that he's a lighthouse keeper) or even another (that he brightens any room he walks into with his enthusiasm) but instead because he dresses like a walking rainbow, and she can't quite figure out whether she wants to be embarrassed or amused by it.<p>

**#20 - Talent**  
>Lanette had an entire repertoire of hidden talents of her own: she could dance with the grace of a professional, she could play the violin, she could paint, she could cook, but most of all, with one smirk, she could make a loner scientist realize that humans can be interesting too.<p>

**#21 - Silence**  
>After the judicial board ruled in his favor, he and Lanette stood outside of the administration building; in the long silence, Lanette studied the boy's face – strained, tired, looking as if he was using up all his willpower to avoid crying – and wondered just what it was that drove her to save the child she thought she hated.<p>

**#22 - Journey**  
>In their world, the word "journey" was a vastly important concept, a rite-of-passage that trainers, breeders, and coordinators all experienced in a literal sense; not many people realized that researchers had journeys too – a journey for truth and understanding, like the one Bill began alone and now, to his surprise, cannot continue without (her being) a companion (to him).<p>

**#23 - Fire**  
>A flareon mysteriously appeared in the laboratory one day; as soon as she saw the ornate collar around its neck and the way it constantly padded after her sister, Brigette didn't need to ask who gave it to her.<p>

**#24 - Strength**  
>There's a number of things that give Bill McKenzie strength: the thought of his sisters, the future he's creating for them and the rest of the world through his work, and the sharp tongue and soft hands of his partner guiding his every move.<p>

**#25 - Mask**  
>"You think I'm crazy," Bill said as he tried on the mask to his new armaldo costume, and Lanette, smiling at how ridiculous he looked, replied that she did but that she couldn't imagine him being anything else.<p>

**#26 - Ice**  
>A spheal mysteriously appeared in the laboratory one day; as soon as they saw it, Bill's kadabra and venusaur exchanged glances and wondered if their master would ever get what message the girl who sent it was giving him.<p>

**#27 - Fall**  
>Because she was born in the summer and he in the winter, one of their middle grounds was fall, with Bill stopping just long enough (for once) to lie in a pile of red and gold leaves on the forest floor and Lanette feeling whimsical enough (for once) to join him.<p>

**#28 - Forgotten**  
>One of Lanette's many flaws – which Bill liked because they were flaws and therefore made her absolutely fascinating to him – was that her memory and organizational skills were frequently sub-par when she was preoccupied with work; for example, she once threatened Bill with blackmail about his flaws (none of which she found all that fascinating, though she put up with them because he's Bill) the day she misplaced her keys and required him to help her break into her own home.<p>

**#29 - Dance**  
>For a while, Bill's fingers danced flawlessly across the piano's keys to play a sonata, but then, he missed several notes when he looked over his shoulder and caught sight of Lanette moving across the floor behind him in a graceful ballet.<p>

**#30 - Body**  
>Bill felt embarrassed, pathetic in his inability to control the body his stupidity gave him and his intelligence couldn't reverse, but when he accidentally tripped over his own paws and went sprawling onto the ground, he was thoroughly surprised to see Lanette not glaring at him sternly but instead smiling warmly as she pulled him to his feet and spent the next hour helping him learn how to cope with his predicament.<p>

**#31 - Sacred**  
>Lanette said nothing as she watched Bill leave an offering and pray at the shrine in the middle of Ilex Forest; she thought it was odd that he had religious beliefs at all until a song filled the woods a few seconds into his ritual.<p>

**#32 - Farewells**  
>When Bill thanked the rattata, removed the tracking device, and set it free again, Lanette watched him solemnly; she had a feeling that he would one day set her free and say goodbye, though she couldn't decide whether she thought it would be best for them or the one thing that would kill them both.<p>

**#33 - World**  
>Just as Ash Ketchum was born to save the world, Bill McKenzie was born to change it; however, Misty Waterflower only served to remind Ash why he was chosen, while Lanette Chastain was Bill's equal – the catalyst who knew all too well that her partner's abilities were nothing but a dangerous, unfocused storm of chaos without her to guide him.<p>

**#34 - Formal**  
>Lanette always grinned over how gaudy and unusually formal that suit looked on him, but she never said anything because she was a lady.<p>

**#35 - Fever**  
>At the height of his fever, he hallucinated that his world was melting; he bit back his screams until she calmed his vision by laying a wet cloth and a soft hand on his forehead.<p>

**#36 - Laugh**  
>It's rare that Bill hears Lanette laugh, but when he does, listening to her share a murmured joke (in French, a language he can't understand) with her sister, the resulting sound reminds him of wind chimes, mermaids, and the Voice of the Forest.<p>

**#37 - Lies**  
>Lanette tells him that the two of them can use words like "lover" only when his work is finished and when he's ready to be something other than a researcher, and because she knows that this will never happen, it's not a lie, although the way he smiles at her afterwards makes it feel like a dirty one.<p>

**#38 - Forever**  
>Sometimes, Bill feels as if Lanette is intentionally holding back her emotions from <em>him<em>; he wonders if the wall that keeps him from fully reaching her will always be between them.

**#39 - Overwhelmed**  
>Contrary to popular belief, Bill had his mental limits, points where he'd break under just enough pressure from the world around him; this happened once with his backers demanding results, his rattata test subject dead from a violently failed experiment, and the media just waiting to pounce on him for news about his latest findings, all of which forced him to lie on his bed in silence, unable to react even when Lanette sat next to him and caressed his forehead with gentle fingertips.<p>

**#40 - Whisper**  
>Bill was good with languages and could speak and understand on a conversational level many of them except, for reasons neither of them knew, the language of Lanette's ancestors, so when he would string together the same question over and over again in every language he thought was beautiful, she would lean close to him and whisper four words she knew he couldn't translate: "Je ne peux pas."<p>

**#41 - Wait**  
>There was a long list of things he would wait for: for the shadowy giant to appear near his lighthouse again, for the pokémon in his dreams to tell him what they wanted, and for her to finally say "yes" to the one question she never answered simply.<p>

**#42 - Talk**  
>Bill liked it best when they were talking, when he coaxed her onto a subject about science or mathematics or something else, because for those moments, Lanette would go from the reserved young lady she was to a force of energy and enthusiasm; at those points, he felt like he was seeing the real Lanette.<p>

**#43 - Search**  
>Muttering to herself about how she told her partner it wouldn't be a good idea to "try being a wild pokémon" by going outside, Lanette's boots pounded the forest floor as her team searched every inch of the brush and trees; in a moment of uncharacteristic weakness, she felt tears come to her eyes in her panic, born from the idea of never catching up with the trainer who thought nothing of capturing a half-human.<p>

**#44 - Hope**  
>To the world, they represented the hope for a better future; to each other, they represented the hope that anyone can be human.<p>

**#45 - Eclipse**  
>"We are looking at history," Bill said in awe, and to that, Lanette side-eyed him and prepared herself to stop her partner from messing with the university's near-mint-condition Data General Eclipse.<p>

**#46 - Gravity**  
>Lanette can never figure out what it is about Bill: no matter how many times she tells herself their relationship must be platonic, no matter how different they are and how frustrating he is to her, and no matter how many other men she dates, she inevitably finds herself drawn back to him over and over again.<p>

**#47 - Highway**  
>When their finest collaborative work was described as "a truck transporting pokémon along the information superhighway" by a news report, Bill burst into laughter; Lanette, despite being amused by it just as much as her partner was, jabbed him in the ribs with an elbow in response.<p>

**#48 - Unknown**  
>Bill solved the puzzle and took Lanette deeper into the Ruins of Alph; she said over and over again that they shouldn't be there, though the protests grew quieter when he grasped her wrist and she felt his curiosity.<p>

**#49 - Lock**  
>Although Lanette was generally better at software than him, if there was one thing Bill knew how to code, it was a security system that suited his levels of paranoia; hence, Lanette got a strange sense of pleasure out of knowing that the only one he really trusted with the passwords to his part of the storage system was her.<p>

**#50 - Breathe**  
>At nights, when she thought he was sleeping and when her head was on his chest, Bill was actually simply lying with his eyes closed; he was too busy being distracted by the fact that the woman next to him – his childhood friend – smelled like lilac and vanilla to fall asleep.<p> 


	4. Delta

**Author's Note:** To clarify #8, there is a graphical error in "Mystery at the Lighthouse" (read: Bill's episode) where one of the panels on his door is a picture of Mewtwo. I'm leaving the rest of that sentence up to your interpretation.

#25 also contains an obscure anime reference. According to the episode "Love at First Flight," what happens in this sentence is meant to bring good luck to couples.

* * *

><p><strong>#01 - Air<strong>  
>Disable – a technique by which psychic pokémon such as kadabra telekinetically raise given targets into the air and temporarily paralyze them until they calm down; the human voice – created by the passage of air across the vocal chords to produce sounds that the tongue molds into words, such as in the instance when a young researcher looks from the formerly rampaging donphan to his injured companion and whispers, "It'll be okay."<p>

**#02 - Apples**  
>Once, while Lanette was peeling and slicing an apple for them to share, she sang a song in French; when Bill complimented her and asked her what it meant, she told him it was about apples, though the look in her eyes told him it wasn't at all.<p>

**#03 - Beginning**  
>"Hi! You're Miss Chastain, aren't you? You're really impressive! I never thought I'd meet someone just like me! My name is William – the one you just beat this time around, in fact! Say, would you like to study with me? It'd be a great way for us to… to keep up with… um," he said, but before he could finish that thought, she glared icily at the sound of his relevance to her and decided right then and there that she didn't hate anything more than him.<p>

**#04 - Bugs**  
>Although she felt terrible for thinking it, Lanette enjoyed watching Bill comb through his programs for bugs, in part because the number of them proved he was only human and in part because there was something satisfying about watching the most gentle and patient person she knew construct a creative string of curses out of frustration.<p>

**#05 - Coffee**  
>Lanette liked her coffee au lait; Bill, who normally drank his coffee black, made the mistake of drinking out of her cup only once (one night in her lab when he was tired and confused her coffee for his for a good half a cup), prompting Lanette to stay by him for the next few hours as he found out what "au lait" meant.<p>

**#06 - Dark**  
>She's still afraid of dark, enclosed spaces; he still keeps this a secret.<p>

**#07 - Despair**  
>Although he jokingly (when Bill and Lanette still held conversations, at least) told her he was excited by the idea of living as a pokémon, when he realized that his mouth wouldn't be able to form coherent words, that his lack of human hands made writing impossible and typing difficult, and that there was absolutely no way for him to tell her the things he had meant to say when he could, he began to feel incredibly, insanely trapped.<p>

**#08 - Doors**  
>"Bill, I've been meaning to ask you. I can identify all of these except this one. What is it?" she asked, pointing to the strange carving on his door; he shrugged and said he can't for the life of him remember, which (for reasons she couldn't identify) left her feeling cold and uncomfortable.<p>

**#09 - Drink**  
>"Bill, if you don't drink this, I will <em>shove it down your throat<em>," Lanette snaps, and before either of their pokémon can stop her, she's on top of him, wrestling with him with one arm while the other somehow manages to keep the cup of herbal tea (meant to be a sedative so that he could sleep off his fever instead of sneak off to run around the laboratory and make it worse "like the idiot he is") perfectly balanced.

**#10 - Duty**  
>"We have a job to do," she reminds him sternly, and although he's the one who needs to be reminded that they have to focus on tracking what could be Groudon, she's the one who wants to resist the reminder.<p>

**#11 - Earth**  
>Eventually, Bill realized that she was his ground, that although he could think without her, all his thoughts were like electricity – unfocused and incoherent until she guided them to a specific point; this didn't alarm him as much as he thought it would have five years ago.<p>

**#12 - End**  
>In another lifetime, she sees him with Professor Oak's (beautiful, kind) granddaughter, and when the woman politely asks her who she is, she nervously stammers that she's Bill's colleague… and, for the first time in her life (as much as she hates to admit it), <em>means <em>just his colleague.

**#13 - Fall**  
>On the one hand, Bill was one of the foremost researchers in Japan, while on the other, he had recently found that he had a strange attachment to the woman he had spent much of his life with (an attachment he still didn't exactly have the words to define); knowing that this was the same pattern his father followed, he wondered which one would kill him first: his career or the fall from it.<p>

**#14 - Fire**  
>She sits, knees drawn to her chest, in the laboratory surrounded by darkness save for the light from a single candle; she feels something in her chest flicker and waver between calm and panic until a pair of warm arms wrap around her and a soft voice whispers into her ear that the generator was fixed and should be kicking in shortly.<p>

**#15 - Flexible**  
>The one sign that Bill, who only had a passing curiosity in astrology, was most definitely a Capricorn was the fact that he was inordinately stubborn; when he was in one of those moods where he felt focused on only one goal (which was often), he would refuse to compromise, refuse to waver in his decisions, and refuse to consider criticism, to which Lanette would sigh and let him go until he finally admitted he made a hopeless mess of things.<p>

**#16 - Flying**  
>"Do you ever wonder how something as small as a pidgey can carry an adult human across great distances?" Bill asked one afternoon, and Lanette idly replied that he was thinking too much about it (again).<p>

**#17 - Food**  
>Bill hated milk, loved seafood, preferred noodles over rice, didn't care for sweets, liked bitter berries, didn't mind tofu in small doses, adored fried things because they reminded him of Goldenrod... and Lanette kept a careful list of these things because she found it was easier to get him to do what she wanted if she offered him the correct combination of bribes.<p>

**#18 - Foot**  
>"Better a slip of the foot than of the tongue," Lanette sighs, and although she says it in a language Bill can understand, she knows he still wouldn't get why his off-handed comment of the day would prompt it.<p>

**#19 - Grave**  
>Although her partner was normally full of smiles and hope and energy, that didn't mean he couldn't be quiet and serious, but when he was, Lanette knew something was deeply, horribly wrong.<p>

**#20 - Green**  
>She once asked him why, of all the colors on the visible spectrum, he dyed his hair green; although he told her it was because the color reminded him of forests, she later noticed that it was the natural color of his sisters and his mother but not his father.<p>

**#21 - Head**  
>Lanette was a woman who thought with her head, who saw every little thing as something to be considered scientifically; there were times when Bill tried to emulate her but stumbled, flustered and embarrassed, because he was ultimately a man who thought with his heart.<p>

**#22 - Hollow**  
>In the hollow by Fallarbor Town, they sat among the flowers, ankles in the river and bodies in the shadow of what was going to be her home; it was his quip about the latter that caused her to splash him playfully and retort, "It's not as crazy as living in a lighthouse, you know."<p>

**#23 - Honor**  
>The truth was that Bill was actually a decent battler but couldn't bring himself to fight because he believed it wasn't right to hurt something that he respected highly (which entailed everyone and everything); Lanette, luckily, didn't hold the same code of ethics.<p>

**#24 - Hope**  
>"I want to meet you," he said, and Lanette couldn't tell whether or not he was talking about his project.<p>

**#25 - Light**  
>Lanette, keeping her eyes on the volbeat and illumise dancing in glowing streaks above the lake, explained the romantic tradition related to their ritual and punctuated it with the fact that she thought it was rather silly; Bill, who was just an inch away from touching her hand, drew his own back to his side and replied, "Yes, of course."<p>

**#26 - Lost**  
>For years, Bill was sure of his purpose and path in life – that he was meant to dedicate his entire soul to unlocking the mysteries of the creatures with which he shared a world, but lately, whether it's because of his awareness of how old he's getting or because of Lanette's kindness towards him since that moment she defended him in college, he can't help but question how sure his path is.<p>

**#27 - Metal**  
>They agreed that the last thing they could possibly do together was bring a child of flesh and blood and thoughts into the world, so they opted for the next best thing by conceiving children of titanium and wire and software.<p>

**#28 - New**  
>If there is any new piece of technology on the market, chances are good that they already have it and that Lanette is already chastising Bill for taking it apart "just to see how it works."<p>

**#29 - Old**  
>Despite the fact that he worked with cutting-edge technology, Bill liked things that were old: Victoriana clothing, his formerly abandoned lighthouse, the concept of chivalry, older women; when he accidentally mentioned the latter to Lanette, she glared at him and stopped answering his phone calls for more than a week, teaching him the value of the old-fashioned concept of shutting up while one is ahead.<p>

**#30 - Peace**  
>Lanette knows more about his past than he thinks she does (because it's not that difficult to connect the dots between him and his father), and because of this, whenever someone brings up the subject of the other Professor McKenzie in his presence, she looks at him and wonders about the parts she doesn't know – the parts that let him respond with an almost unnerving sense of serenity and grace.<p>

**#31 - Poison**  
>Lanette knew that every moment they were together, every moment she touched him and let him touch her, she was poisoning him, shooting him down from his lofty pillar as a creature of science and observation by giving him human urges, yet she couldn't help but feel no guilt whatsoever.<p>

**#32 - Pretty**  
>"Hey, beautiful! Can you help me out here?" he asks in their second-ever conversation, and after she looks from her half-tied shoelace to her classmate (dangling upside-down in the tree branches above her, probably due to the rugby team's idea of hazing), her only response is to laugh and walk away.<p>

**#33 - Rain**  
>"Did I ever tell you the story of Kyogre?" Lanette asks as she gazes at the torrents outside, and her voice is so quiet that Bill is immediately by her side, hand on her shoulder as he prepares to do everything he can to reassure her.<p>

**#34 - Regret**  
>There are times when Lanette, remembering how she treated him at first, opens her mouth to apologize, but before she can utter a single word, Bill cuts her off and says, "I know what you're thinking, but we're friends now. What you did in the past doesn't matter to me. Don't let it matter to you."<p>

**#35 - Roses**  
>He hates clichés, and she doesn't like roses anyway.<p>

**#36 - Secret**  
>"You do realize we can't let anyone see you like this, right?" Lanette asked calmly, but when her partner – who was half-<em>something<em>-that-wasn't-human – tilted his head and gave her a lost look, she had to sigh and remind him that the scientific community routinely made a big deal out of _gold-colored rattata_.

**#37 - Snakes**  
>The field outside of Lanette's home is infested with both zangoose and seviper; there once was a whole list of reasons why this worried Bill greatly until the afternoon he saw her send her spinda to blast one of each with Water Pulse for taking their fight to her garden.<p>

**#38 - Snow**  
>It was a welcome sight, in Bill's opinion, to watch the ice queen's heart melt just a little as she sat back, cup of tea in her hands and eyes on the stantler playing in the snow outside the pokémon center.<p>

**#39 - Solid**  
>"I take it you have a solid plan this time?" Lanette says, keeping her weight on the chair holding the cabin door shut, but when her partner looks from the window (and the swarm of angry beedrill outside) to her, he can only grin sheepishly.<p>

**#40 - Spring**  
>Somewhere on the list of things most of the other programmers have banned Bill from having in the laboratory is a Slinky; there's an elaborate story behind this that never fails to color Lanette's cheeks with the brightest possible red.<p>

**#41 - Stable**  
>Once, Brigette heard them playing Canon in D together in the next room – Bill's piano keying the underlying rhythm of the melody from Lanette's violin, and when she noticed how well his tune supported her sister's and how much her chords shaped his into a <em>song<em>, Brigette realized that this was a good way to describe their relationship as a whole.

**#42 - Strange**  
>It was a universally understood truth that Bill was eccentric – that conventions genuinely made him antsy – and that Lanette, by contrast, at least tried to feign normalcy, yet no matter how embarrassingly odd he was, that single major conflict between their personalities was exactly what made Lanette smile when no one was looking.<p>

**#43 - Summer**  
>Lanette liked summer because of the heat, the color, the pokémon, the long nights when she and the other programmers would sit around a circle and tell each other ghost stories, and the feeling she got from being the only one who, after every one of Bill's, could stare directly across the circle at the storyteller calmly and unafraid.<p>

**#44 - Taboo**  
>Bill doesn't give a damn what people think about him, but Lanette can't tell if she should be relieved or concerned about this.<p>

**#45 - Ugly**  
>"Lanette, did you really think I called you 'beautiful' back then just to be clever?"<p>

**#46 - War**  
>They were in a secret war with each other, one where Lanette would let Bill think he's nearly outsmarted her, nearly dominated her (in bed or otherwise) just before she would strike (correcting him, tricking him, making him beg for her) and bring him to his knees.<p>

**#47 - Water**  
>Despite the fact that Lanette can't swim, she has no trouble being around water; in fact, it amuses her when she notices Bill bristle subtly whenever she boards the ferry to Hoenn.<p>

**#48 - Welcome**  
>Bill's mother and youngest sister didn't hesitate about ushering Lanette into the house and showering her with welcomes… while Bill himself smacked a palm to his forehead and insisted that she was <em>only<em> his partner – his _research _partner, thank you very much.

**#49 - Winter**  
>Lanette didn't mind winter because of the snow, the peace, the nights when he drew himself close to her because she was shivering, and the feeling she got when he didn't believe a single word of her protests against this.<p>

**#50 - Wood**  
>"Listen," Bill suddenly said, and Lanette, sitting beside him under a tree in Ilex Forest, stopped to figure out what he wanted her to hear and caught the sound of something ancient and melodious weaving itself between the trees.<p> 


	5. Epsilon

**Author's Note:** Last set; last notes. Thanks to everyone who stuck around for the ride! All of you are sweethearts who made this a lot of fun to do.

Re, #5: You're welcome.

* * *

><p><strong>#01 – Motion<strong>  
>The first time they make love, her hands guide his – gently, slowly, as if she was guiding him to specific points on a map – until he begins to know her.<p>

**#02 – Cool**  
>Either because the interior of the Sea Cottage is perpetually chilly or because researchers aren't always darting back and forth in their own laboratories, Bill's hands are almost always cold; sometimes, Lanette sees his pale fingertips and feels tempted to warm them between her palms.<p>

**#03 – Young**  
>Amanita is young, not stupid or innocent; this (among other reasons, including a not-too-pleased Fennel) is why she terrified Bill when she went right up to him and said, "You know, it's not that hard to figure out what you're doing with Lanette."<p>

**#04 – Last**  
>Despite how observant Bill was when it came to pokémon, he was usually the last to figure out things concerning humans, like the fact that Celio was gay, that Brigette was bisexual, that Bebe used to have a crush on him but now had <em>that <em>kind of relationship with Hayley; Lanette didn't mind how oblivious her partner was, in part because it amused her and in part because she knew he was too dense to react to the way she treated him.

**#05 – Wrong**  
>One of the places where they made love was within the chamber of the teleporter – the one subsequently built into the storage system as the component that transports your poké balls to every pokémon center in Kanto and Johto.<p>

**#06 – Gentle**  
>Lanette can be gentle if she wants to be, but these moments are usually in private, when her careful hands redress his wounds and caress his face while her words are not reprimands but instead "I'm worried about you."<p>

**#07 – One**  
>Just as there is only one Ho-oh, one Kyogre, one Groudon, one Jirachi on this planet, there is only one Bill, and although Lanette knows it'd be just as bad to capture his heart as it would be to catch one of the embodiments of nature, the scientist in her – the curious creature attracted to all the unstoppable forces of the world – tempts her to try anyway.<p>

**#08 – Thousand**  
>They meet each other in a thousand different lives, in a thousand different universes, in a thousand different moments where they never actually say how much they need each other, and in this one, Lanette realizes it's because it doesn't need to be said.<p>

**#09 – King**  
>In a way, the programmers' relationships to each other could be likened to chess pieces: Bill, the king (the centerpiece of their efforts, the one around whom everyone else danced); Celio, the pawn (the one who bowed before the others' talents); Amanita, the rook (straightforward in everything she does); Bebe, the knight (one of the most loyal servants to the group); Brigette, the bishop (moving at her own pace and in her own direction compared to the others); and Lanette, the queen (the one who would fight the hardest to defend the king).<p>

**#10 – Learn**  
>Although Lanette is ashamed of how she treated Bill before they were partners, if there is anything positive she could say about that time, it's that it made her realize it was easier for her to absorb information when she felt like she was in competition with him.<p>

**#11 – Blur**  
>Without lenses over her eyes, Lanette saw the world as a massive, rainbow blur; she hated feeling that vulnerable but somehow managed to tolerate it when Bill found her glasses on the floor and carefully placed them back on her face without a word.<p>

**#12 – Wait**  
>The day before graduation, as soon as she reached the tree (that familiar tree), the first words out of her mouth were an apology, and to this, he smiled, handed her a notebook, and replied, "I'd wait all day for you. You're the only one who can help me with a little science project I have in mind. What do you say about violating the laws of physics?"<p>

**#13 – Change**  
>Bill was fascinated by change and in fact based his entire career around it one way (revolutions in technology) or another (reinventing the way people thought about pokémon), but when he accidentally walked in on Lanette – his childhood friend, the one person he wasn't used to seeing as a <em>woman<em> – taking a bath, the avalanche of illogical thoughts that ran through his brain for the next week almost made him hate it.

**#14 – Command**  
>The misconception concerning them was that most people assumed Bill was the de facto leader of the programmers and that the storage system was largely his work, but in reality, Lanette, who had an equal hand in everything, simply thought he had more of an ability to demand the respect of others than she did and therefore <em>arranged <em>things so that he was the one the interviewers would go to first.

**#15 – Hold**  
>Bill sat, fingers laced, bellsprout-shaped receiver lying beside him, Lanette on hold; he pretended he was going to address an emergency with the Kanto branch of the system but was, in reality, struggling to suppress the completely inexplicable feeling of irritation he got at the mention of her new boyfriend.<p>

**#16 – Need**  
>When Lanette began to see him as a friend instead of a rival, she noticed that although he was friendly and liked company, he thoroughly believed he didn't actually need anyone; years later, as she stitched shut his latest accident, she caught a split second of confusion on his face that made her wonder whether or not that fact was still true.<p>

**#17 – Vision**  
>At one point, his style of research wasn't so much the product of pure genius as it was the product of pure genius combined with a cocktail of psychedelics, but he vowed to kick his dependency on the latter when one bad trip made him see swarms of kabutops slicing her open and feeding on her slick, pink entrails.<p>

**#18 – Attention**  
>Bill once jokingly asked her if she was jealous of all the attention Celio, Bebe, and the rest world gave him; Lanette responded with a smirk and the reply she knew would irritate him to what she thought were adorable levels: "Only a little bit."<p>

**#19 – Soul**  
>He puts everything he is into everything he does, and she wonders one night while lying against him what part of him she would have left if he lost <em>everything<em>.

**#20 – Picture**  
>"I'm not laughing. I just think it's cute," Lanette said as she hid her smile behind a hand; in response, Bill glared at her as coldly as he could and snatched back the picture of what he looked like as an eight-year-old in a high school uniform.<p>

**#21 – Fool**  
>Hours before he met Ash Ketchum, Bill sat trapped in the kabuto costume, dwelling on his predicament and idly wondering what was worse: the fact that his eagerness got him into this mess or the fact that he was too proud to call Lanette and ask for help.<p>

**#22 – Mad**  
>All of Bill's ideas were, at first, typically perceived by the rest of the scientific community as being the products of fragile psychological stability (especially considering the fact that many of these ideas seemed to involve disregarding the laws of physics), but what reassured Lanette the most was hearing Bill proclaim, in typical comic-book fashion, that he would only use his powers for good – because it reminded Lanette that even if he <em>was<em> insane, it was the _good_ kind of insane.

**#23 – Child**  
>Amanita is young but gifted with intelligence and Unovian bluntness, and for this reason, out of nowhere in a conversation with Lanette, she likens her role model's relationship with Bill to her big sister's relationship with Professor Juniper and clarifies this by stating, "When you say he's your partner, you mean he's <em>that <em>kind of partner, don't you?"

**#24 – Now**  
>Bill thinks of the past when he's alone and the future when he's hard at work, but he thinks of the present – the now – when they experiment together, as if being conscious of it will make it last.<p>

**#25 – Shadow**  
>Frequently, Bill describes the shadows he sees to her – the ones in his dreams, the giant one shrouded in fog, the countless unknowns that reached out for him, and Lanette sits and listens quietly until the end, when she still doesn't know what to say as a reply.<p>

**#26 – Goodbye**  
>Bill wasn't human anymore, but despite the fact that she had no idea if he understood her, Lanette kept her promise because she just didn't have the heart to say goodbye to him – not when she wanted to believe that the look in his eyes was some evidence that a shade of him still existed deep beneath the feathers and claws and raw instinct.<p>

**#27 – Hide**  
>There was a strategic advantage to living in Goldenrod, one where it was easy to hide in plain sight because of the overwhelming number of people and how friendly they were to decent folks; for that reason, even if Team Rocket infested the streets, not a single agent was able to find the completely ordinary apartment where the McKenzies and half a city block hid one of their own and the girl they practically accepted too.<p>

**#28 – Fortune**  
>Lanette teaches him how to read the future in a deck of cards, Bill uses the same deck to teach her how to play blackjack, and in both, the outcome seems to favor her over him.<p>

**#29 – Safe**  
>Before he met her, Bill heard of her from rumors and the scoreboards, how she was only twelve but competing for the top score on every exam against eleven-year-old him, and as he stared at her name on the board – this time above his – he concluded that she was just like him and that he <em>had <em>to meet her… because he knew even then that he wouldn't be safe to be himself with anyone but her.

**#30 – Ghost**  
>For the next several months, Lanette walked down the halls and pathways of Celadon University feeling as if she was being followed, but every time she turned, she would only catch a glimpse of the spirit behind her: a rustling bush here, a closing door there, a figure darting into a crowd too quickly for her to see properly.<p>

**#31 – Book**  
>The truth was that Bill had little patience for books (reading them or writing them himself) while Lanette adored them, and as such, Bill did his best to pretend he knew anything about them as Lanette, fingering spines of potential purchases at a used book store, smiled and humored him.<p>

**#32 – Eye**  
>When Lanette adjusts her eyeglasses, Bill knows it's usually to highlight the expression she's about to make, like the one where she adjusts her glasses and looks at him with mischievous eyes when she's about to trick him… or, more frequently, the one where she adjusts her glasses and looks at him with an ice-cold glare as he walks in to be patched up.<p>

**#33 – Never**  
>"What would you do if you never met me?" Lanette asks; she says it as an off-handed joke but feels her smile falter when she notices Bill's expression.<p>

**#34 – Sing**  
>On the very rare occasion that he's lonely, he plays the piano; she found this out one day as she stood in the shadows of one of Celadon University's auditoriums, listening and naming all the tunes and wanting for that brief moment to go to the stranger on the stage and tell him she knew all his songs.<p>

**#35 – Sudden**  
>Lanette knows that Bill doesn't do anything without a good reason for it, but nonetheless, his decision to drag her to Unova to experience first-hand all the pokémon the region had to offer seemed random even to her… until she found out about the region's drastically changing seasons and Amanita's hypothesis that these may affect eevee.<p>

**#36 – Stop**  
>Lanette wishes she could stop Bill and show him how self-destructive his habits and priorities are regardless of how well-intentioned they might be, but she knows her partner well and can't say anything because she knows how well he would(n't) understand.<p>

**#37 – Time**  
>To Bill, time and space were only barriers whose solidity had to be tested – forces of physics he knew he could defy if he really tried; in another lifetime, Lanette, though normally proud to work with him on projects like these, felt that there was something genuinely <em>wrong<em> about his latest proposal and absolutely refused to have anything to do with the Time Capsule.

**#38 – Wash**  
>Lanette couldn't decide whether to be amused or exasperated when Bill, mid-shower, ran his fingers along her wet body and labeled the anatomical parts he touched, one by one.<p>

**#39 – Torn**  
>When Bill's youngest sister came up to him in tears just before her first contest to show him the tear in her costume, Lanette, who always thought her partner wasn't particularly domestic, didn't expect him to do anything but encourage her to do her best anyway, so she couldn't help but raise her eyebrows when she saw him calmly take out his sister's unopened sewing kit and teach her how to fix it.<p>

**#40 – History**  
>"Those who cannot learn from history are doomed to repeat it," Lanette told him bitterly as she yanked each pin from his back, and to this, Bill, who had just survived an encounter with several (justifiably) angry beedrill, could only grumble a response in between sharp yelps.<p>

**#41 – Power**  
>When the jet of water dispersed and Entei (wide-eyed and snarling) fled to parts unknown, Bill lowered his shaking hands, dropped to his knees, and looked over his shoulder at Lanette (who was equally shocked to watch her best friend pull a Water Gun out of literally thin air) to say, "Lanette... help me."<p>

**#42 – Bother**  
>Sometimes, on very rare occasions (and almost always when there is a wound that needs to be stitched up or a patch of pins that need to be extracted or some other silly injury), Bill admits fault and apologizes for inconveniencing her, and to this, she smiles and says, "It's no bother, Bill. Someone has to do it."<p>

**#43 – God**  
>After Entei appeared to them, Bill knew what was coming and knew just as well that he had to <em>speed up <em>his transformation, not slow it down – because although he didn't know whether or not whatever it was he was becoming could stand up to his gods, he still wasn't about to let their wrath hurt her.

**#44 – Wall**  
>What scares Lanette more than darkness is the fact that she realizes Bill sees the walls she's built around herself – the ones meant to protect him, if anyone at all, from getting hurt – as a challenge instead of a warning.<p>

**#45 – Naked**  
>The things that made Bill human were never any clearer than when he was naked; then, Lanette would lightly trace her fingers over the countless scars he had gained over the years from one mistake or another while he lay back, eyes closed and breath coming in short gasps.<p>

**#46 – Drive**  
>At one point, the other programmers were surprised to find out Bill didn't know how to drive; they were doubly surprised to find out that, despite the fact that she was normally quick to reprimand him for his mistakes, Lanette was the only one calm and patient enough to teach him.<p>

**#47 – Harm**  
>William – the name literally meant "determined protector"; Lanette couldn't help but realize that it fit her partner well when he, sometime after the awakening of Ho-oh by Team Rocket, grasped her shoulders tightly and said, "No matter what happens, I want you to know I will never let anything hurt you."<p>

**#48 – Precious**  
>"You need to ask yourself this, Bill: what's more important to you? Your purpose or your own desires? Do you want to make this world a better place, or do you want to give in to distractions now? What do you want?" she asks him, and although he would have responded without hesitation a few years ago, now he looks at her and knows in his heart that the answer is a little less clear.<p>

**#49 – Hunger**  
>No matter how many men she had been with, Lanette knows that none of them have what she's looking for; none of them have that innocence, that wit, that gentleness, that precision, that hodgepodge of everything that would satisfy the incessant hunger she felt – that hodgepodge she knew to be her partner.<p>

**#50 - Believe**  
>After all the world burns to cinders thanks to Team Rocket and an enraged Ho-oh, the remnants of humanity cluster in small settlements around cooking fires and share stories throughout the cold nights: folktales about a two wanderers who travel the dead region with contraptions – magical devices that they (the witch and her companion included if, as the storytellers say, they actually exist) believe have the power to save their tomorrows.<p> 


End file.
